David Crowe - Hemingway and Ho Chi Minh in Paris

I offer here two ways to help readers navigate this unusual biography of two young men and a city.

First, if they are like virtually every person I have ever told about this book concerning Ernest Hemingway and Ho Chi Minh, readers will be quick to ask, Did they know each other? For a time I answered, No, theres no record of a meeting. After thinking further about the possibilities, I learned to answer, They lived only three blocks apart and shared a market street that ran between their flats. They read a lot, and they both published many articles and stories in Paris. One year, Ho lived a couple doors down from the Hemingways maid and her husband, who were also Ernest and his wife Hadleys dear friends. So Hemingway and Ho probably knew of each other, and they might even have met briefly, but Im afraid there is no record of that meeting.

What I want to sayI hope without any real defensivenessis that this book is not about how the two men affected each other. That would be a short book indeed. It is about the more complicated story of how Paris affected both of them, and affected them similarly, in the same Left Bank neighborhood and during the same few years. I began writing with only a vague sense of these similarities, but my research surprised me again and again with the depth of these shared experiences and the mens resulting shared commitments to justice.

Next, readers should know that Ho Chi Minhs and Hemingways years in Paris overlapped only partially. Ho lived there before Hemingway, from 1919 to 1921, and Hemingway lingered in the city after Ho left it, from 1923 to 1928. So, reader, be prepared: The first part of the book is about circumstances that led the men to bring similar burdens with them to Paris. Then there are a few chapters focusing mainly on Hothough there are parallel events and experiences in Hemingways life to uncover. A number of chapters concern the men living near each other and performing very similar work in a neighborhood called la Mouffe. Then, finally, there are a few chapters mainly about Hemingwaythough there are parallel events and experiences in Hos life to uncover. Notably, a few of Hos later interactions with Parisian institutions (revolutionary cells, publishers, and the League of Nations) were from a distance, all the way from Russia and then China. Few readers should find this confusing, but I want to be clear and, I hope, helpful about the books organization.

Finally, there is the problem of Ho Chi Minhs many pseudonyms, which include the name Ho Chi Minh itself. Readers may find it helpful to know that throughout this book, I will match Hos many traditional and pseudonymous names to the appropriate historical moment. At his birth in 1890, Hos parents gave him the milk name of Nguyen Sinh Cung. Following Vietnamese tradition, at age ten he was given another name, Nguyen Tat Thanh. This should have been Hos name throughout life, but he chose to use many pseudonyms. When he left Vietnam at age twenty-one, he took the pseudonymous nickname Ba, dropping the given name Thanh for all time. He worked under the name Ba in Marseille, Boston, New York, London, and many colonial ports of call for a few years, and then moved to Paris around 1918, adopting the dignified symbolic pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Nguyen Who Is a Patriot. For a brief time in Paris he used the sarcastic pseudonym Nguyen Ai Phap, or Nguyen Who Hates the French. Finally, in 1944, as emerging leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement, he began to sign official documents with the name Ho Chi Minh, or He Who Has Been Enlightened. He kept using that name until his death in 1969. He used other pseudonyms more briefly, usually to escape official notice, but we will not trouble ourselves with those names. At bottom, if you are reading about Thanh, Ba, or Quoc in this book, you are reading about the future Ho Chi Minh. But even this knowledge is nonessential, as each chapter is marked with the relevant year and name.

This is the story of two young men who came to Paris to join a resistance movement that had been going on since the end of the previous century, a modern arts-and-politics movement that had accelerated sharply as the Great War ended in 1918. These young men knew that in postwar Paris a search was underway for new political, artistic, and journalistic practices that might sweep away the oligarchs, profiteers, corrupt politicians, colonial overseers, extreme nationalists, and casual bigots who had united to prosecute and prolong the first-ever world war. Like other hopeful modernists who came to Paris just after the war, they hoped to join with those who would dismantle a system of empire that was then bleeding dry Europes laborers and colonial subjects. These two young men hoped for the birth of a new freedom for people like themselvessmart, talented, humane, and hopeful, but seemingly consigned by the powers that be to the role of mere cannon fodder.

One of these men came to Paris determined to become an important writer. Soon, he decided to write as a modernist, which meant doing justice to the new theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freudrecent liberators in the theological, political, and sexual realms.[1] This young man wanted his writing to be existentially, politically, and psychologically realistic. He wanted to add his testimony to those who wrote about the challenges of living as a newly liberated person in a suffocating, pious Victorian culture, burdened with smug Christian confidence and a strong tendency toward violence.

He brought to Paris a unique viewpoint: he had nearly been killed in a battle with the soldiers of empire. He had not yet completely overcome the shock and outrage resulting from that trauma, so he found himself often angrier and more argumentative than his peers.

Over the course of the next three years, he would study in French libraries, visit galleries with friends, and attend a Parisian salon that was really a kind of debating society for modern ideas. There he learned about avant-garde arts such as Dada, surrealism, jazz and other black arts, Stravinsky, the Ballet Russe, cubism, vorticism, and the new French love of abstract art generally. On his own, he read Shakespeare and Dickens and Dostoevsky. He made friends who encouraged him in his writing, including French anti-war novelist Henri Barbusse, who showed him how to write acerbic accounts of recent violence from the point of view of the victim.

During this time of learning, he worked as a reporter, covering peace conferences that we now know actually scripted both another world war and the many local ethnic-nationalist conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked as a fiction writer too, but there was a serious snag. Stunningly, one day this apprentice writers manuscripts were stolen. At first depressed and enraged at the loss, he soon took the opportunity to begin the painstaking task of learning to write a different, more modern prose. He began to write vivid prose poems about the suffering of the centurys refugees and reluctant combatants, and this writing went well. He found an audience. Eventually he gave up journalism to dedicate himself to his more literary art, and because of the new literary circles he now ran in, he began to edit and publish in a modernist little magazine, a sort of bohemian pamphlet for small audiences. Once his readership was large enough to make him known internationally, he was able to consider leaving Paris for greater things. Before long, he found that a book he had written had earned a broad international readership. He had become regarded not just as a writer but as a revolutionary new thinker redefining his culture.